You have to hand it to Robert Arneson. Almost 50 years after he made most of the libidinal, occasionally lascivious ceramic pieces in this show, many of them still look racy, even grotesque. He was in his mid-30s halfway through the 1960s and teaching ceramics at UC Davis, where he would stay almost until his death in 1992. His medium didn’t rank highly in most art-world hierarchies at the time, and so he really let it rip. To his great credit, the results continue to be unsettling.
The centerpiece at Zwirner is the most unrepentantly kinky urinal you are ever likely to encounter. It has a fleshy pink interior that includes a depiction of a woman’s breasts; a full-lipped mouth crowns its handle. The urinal is flanked by two rows of other ceramics, trophies that are glazed such that they look slathered in gold, silver and bronze. Their handles are awkwardly shaped and uneven, clearly fashioned by hand, though it’s in their details that things get truly weird. Sex-Life Trophy (1965) sprouts open legs at its top, a man is at work on a toilet in a little room inside Flush Trophy (1965), and Love Trophy (1965) is adorned with buttocks and testicles. They’re disgusting, but also sinisterly hilarious. Mr. Arneson was after the private lives of objects, the symbolic meanings and the personal, psychological resonances they acquire over time, which are not pretty, particularly when egoistic monuments (real or not) are involved.
Everywhere, his objects seem to be cracking open, leaking secrets, or worse, about to unleash some sort of dangerous life force. A hand is creeping out of the 1965 swastika-marked Toaster, mirroring the digits that emerge from some of Ken Price’s abstract ceramics of the time. (Others have actually transformed into living things: a phone receiver’s speaker turned into a mouth and a bottle transmogrified into a penis, a recurring motif in Mr. Arneson’s world.)
This unsettled effect reaches its apotheosis in his surprisingly noble-looking Self-Portrait of the Artist Losing His Marbles (1965), on loan from the Museum of Arts & Design, in which marbles spill out of a fissure that widens as it extends from his mouth to his chest. It’s funny but also moving, this rather nice-looking man—he has the earnest demeanor of a 19th-century inventor—coming goofily apart. Mr. Arneson’s work is at its best at such moments, when he was gleefully using coarse materials to channel base, rarely examined emotions. I wouldn’t want to be confronted with these works on a regular basis—it takes brave collectors to sport some of his more outré pieces in their homes—but I’m comforted knowing that someone has made them, that they’re out there. (Through Aug. 9, 2013)
